Humanities Division welcomes 7 new faculty members for 2024-25

Sean Brenner | September 24, 2024

As the 2024–25 academic year begins, the Humanities Division is welcoming seven new faculty members. Collectively, they bring to the division a wide array of expertise and interests; the subjects of their research span the globe, range from ancient times to the present day and even transcend species.

We extend a warm welcome to each of them. Following is a look at our newest faculty members’ scholarly interests and the courses they plan to teach:

Nina Duthie, Asian Languages and Cultures, studies narrative literature from early medieval through medieval China (220–907 CE), with an emphasis on texts from the northern dynasties. Her current project explores the representation of the Tuoba Xianbei rulers of the Northern Wei state (386–534 CE) through the sixth-century Wei shu, and incorporates issues of mythology, ritual and Buddhist writing. She teaches undergraduate courses in premodern Chinese narrative and fiction, classical Chinese, early Chinese philosophy and the survey course Chinese Civilization.

Dieter Gunkel, Classics and Indo-European Studies, specializes in the development of ancient Greek, Latin, and related Indo-European languages, and will be teaching courses on those topics. He is also interested in how language is set to poetic meter and melody, and he is currently researching the relationship between the melody of speech and song in ancient Greek vocal music.

Allison Kanner-Botan, Comparative Literature, is a scholar of the literary cultures of early Eurasia, specializing in Arabic and Persian literature of the Persianate world — roughly from the Balkans to Bengal. Her interdisciplinary research extends across the fields of the history of sexuality, madness and disability studies, Mediterranean and Central Asian literary history, and global south studies. She enjoys teaching broad comparative courses that bring into dialogue European and Middle Eastern materials around themes such as love, madness and animality.

Jonah Katz, Linguistics, studies the physical and perceptual nature of speech sounds, the way that different types of sounds pattern together in natural languages, and the relationship between these two areas. He also conducts research on the structure and cognition of music and its relationship to language. At UCLA, he will teach graduate and undergraduate classes at all levels on spoken-language phonology, the nature and structure of linguistic sounds.

Nancy Alicia Martínez, Comparative Literature, works on the histories of recorded knowledge, including technologies like writing and books, and how they impact communication across languages and cultures. She focuses on the cultures of Central America and Central Europe from the 20th century to the present, addressing how indigeneity, decoloniality, coloniality and empire influence creative production and its reception.

Roberta Morosini, European Languages and Transcultural Studies, investigates Dante and, more generally, Medieval and Early Modern visual and literary culture within a pan-Mediterranean perspective. Her studies revolve around blue humanism, and her teaching and research raise awareness of forced migrations, displacement and slavery of and in the Black Mediterranean. She is teaching courses on Archipelagic-Mediterranean Dante and on Boccaccio and women at the sea.

Vetri Nathan, European Languages and Transcultural Studies, studies a range of subjects, from the cultural foundations of environmental justice — and injustice — to national, racial and diasporic identities, particularly but not limited to Italy and the wider Mediterranean region. He is the founder and director of the Cybercene Lab, a new humanities lab that will start up at UCLA in the coming year. The lab is envisioned as a gathering space to study multispecies wellbeing, healing and habitability, and the connections between cultural discourse in a digitally connected world, manufactured conflicts, climate change and habitat and biodiversity loss. His courses will explore various topics such as Italian and global food studies, Black and migrant Italy and the multispecies humanities.